Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans and the end of World War I, also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world. As we did last year, we want to recognize and thank these courageous men and women who willingly serve to defend the freedoms and rights of others.
For those of us who haven’t served, it’s also a day when we can seek to understand what it means to serve in the armed forces—in any country—and the burdens that military personnel and their families bear on our behalf.
This year, we celebrate the holiday with a special doodle on google.com—and YouTube is featuring content from veterans sharing their personal stories about life in combat and beyond. You’ll hear from Peter, who was awarded a Silver Star, the third-highest military decoration that can be awarded to a member of any branch of the U.S. armed forces for valor; Justin, a disabled veteran who is advocating for wounded warriors; and other brave men and women.
The Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans’ issues led 11 service projects in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia—bringing employees together with those who have served or are still serving. Nearly 200 Googlers volunteered approximately 500 hours in local communities like Ann Arbor, MI. and Seattle, WA. In Mountain View, we taught 510 students at Monta Loma Elementary School about the historic meaning of November 11 and service to one’s country. We also offered Veterans Day and Remembrance Day menus in our company cafes, including military paraphernalia displays and samples of MREs (meals ready to eat).
Through financial and in-kind support, the Google Veterans Network has worked closely with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the Coming Home Project, Fisher House Foundation (Puget Sound), the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, The Royal British Legion and The Returned and Services League of Australia to make this November 11 a special one.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Helping you find emergency information when you need it
(Cross-posted from the google.org blog)
This effort started last year when I received an email from a mother in the U.S. who had trouble finding the phone number for the poison control hotline after her daughter accidentally ingested something potentially poisonous (fortunately, her daughter was fine). As a result, people in the U.S. performing various searches including "poison control" began to see a special result displaying the national phone number for the American Association of Poison Control Centers last fall.
Example of the poison control result in SpainSoon after we added poison control information to search results, we heard from Googlers whose lives had been affected by suicide and who thought that suicide prevention could be another case for a special search result. In April we began prominently displaying the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of the results page for certain search queries in the U.S. Since then, our friends at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have reported a 9 percent increase in legitimate calls to its hotline.
Example of the suicide prevention result in the U.K.So, following positive feedback from consumers and our hotline partners, we decided to expand the poison control and suicide prevention special search results beyond the U.S. Each of these 13 countries will see one or more of these results: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We looked for hotlines that are available nationally and 24/7 and we hope to add additional countries in the future.
We're also introducing a new special search result for common emergencies, such as fire, medical and police emergencies. We want to make this information easier to find for residents as well as travelers, especially as some countries have different numbers for different emergencies.
Example of the emergency number result in FranceAn emergency is stressful enough. We hope this small step helps connect people with the information they need immediately.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A brand-new interface for AdSense
If you’re an online publisher running a website that relies on ad revenues—whether it’s a blog or an entertainment website—it can sometimes be complex to get started and to find new ways to make more money from your ads.
As I’ve previously written, we’re committed to helping online publishers—large and small—“find the advertising gold hidden within their sites,” so they can fund their websites and online content. At the core of these efforts—as it has been for more than seven years—is AdSense, which now has more than 2 million publishers in more than 200 countries who use it to fund great online businesses.
Over the last few years, we’ve invested significantly in improving AdSense so that it provides the best solution to help all publishers make the most money possible from online advertising. We’ve added a range of new ad formats (including video and rich media), improved our publisher filters, enabled better targeting that drives higher returns (like remarketing and above-the-fold targeting) and introduced increased competition for publishers’ ad space by bringing in additional advertisers and certified ad networks.
To continue helping our publishers, today we’re excited to be rolling out a completely new AdSense interface to all of our AdSense publishers, globally, in more than 30 languages and in each of the 200+ countries where AdSense is available. The AdSense interface is how publishers set up, manage, optimize and see reports on the ads on their sites.
With this new interface, AdSense is even easier to use, and we’re also providing publishers with all the tools they need to manage and increase their advertising revenue. We used lots of direct feedback from our publishers to make this overhaul. If you’re an online publisher, it helps you in three main ways:
The new interface is just the latest milestone in our efforts to help you make more money from all your online content. We look forward to hearing from as many publishers as possible, to learn what you like about this interface and where we can continue to improve.
To learn more, read our post on the Inside AdSense blog or visit google.com/ads/newadsense.
As I’ve previously written, we’re committed to helping online publishers—large and small—“find the advertising gold hidden within their sites,” so they can fund their websites and online content. At the core of these efforts—as it has been for more than seven years—is AdSense, which now has more than 2 million publishers in more than 200 countries who use it to fund great online businesses.
Over the last few years, we’ve invested significantly in improving AdSense so that it provides the best solution to help all publishers make the most money possible from online advertising. We’ve added a range of new ad formats (including video and rich media), improved our publisher filters, enabled better targeting that drives higher returns (like remarketing and above-the-fold targeting) and introduced increased competition for publishers’ ad space by bringing in additional advertisers and certified ad networks.
To continue helping our publishers, today we’re excited to be rolling out a completely new AdSense interface to all of our AdSense publishers, globally, in more than 30 languages and in each of the 200+ countries where AdSense is available. The AdSense interface is how publishers set up, manage, optimize and see reports on the ads on their sites.
With this new interface, AdSense is even easier to use, and we’re also providing publishers with all the tools they need to manage and increase their advertising revenue. We used lots of direct feedback from our publishers to make this overhaul. If you’re an online publisher, it helps you in three main ways:
- More insights. We’ve built in simple, graphical reporting and more options for you to easily slice and dice your data, so you can see at a glance what ads are working and which are not, and adjust your strategies accordingly.
- More control. We’ve made our ad controls richer and simpler to use, so you can better control which ads and advertisers you want to appear on your sites.
- More efficiency. It’s now much easier to quickly see earnings and payment information, to run reports, to find relevant features and help, and to make account changes. Our engineers have spent countless hours making sure that the interface is stable and blazing fast. We’ve also spent many hours in our usability labs with publishers, focused on making the interface easy to learn and use for all types of publishers.
The new interface is just the latest milestone in our efforts to help you make more money from all your online content. We look forward to hearing from as many publishers as possible, to learn what you like about this interface and where we can continue to improve.
To learn more, read our post on the Inside AdSense blog or visit google.com/ads/newadsense.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Voice Search in underrepresented languages
(Cross-posted from the Google Research Blog)
Welkom*!
Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages.
We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven’t been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.
We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.
We also think it’s important that researchers in these countries take a leading role in advancing the state of the art in their own languages. To this end, we’ve collaborated with the Multilingual Speech Technology group at South Africa’s North-West University led by Prof. Ettiene Barnard (also of the Meraka Research Institute), an authority in speech technology for South African languages. Our development effort was spearheaded by Charl van Heerden, a South African intern and a student of Prof. Barnard. With the help of Prof. Barnard’s team, we collected acoustic data in the three languages, developed lexicons and grammars, and Charl and others used those to develop the three Voice Search systems. A team of language specialists traveled to several cities collecting audio samples from hundreds of speakers in multiple acoustic conditions such as street noise, background speech, etc. Speakers were asked to read typical search queries into an Android app specifically designed for audio data collection.
For Zulu, we faced the additional challenge of few text sources on the web. We often analyze the search queries from local versions of Google to build our lexicons and language models. However, for Zulu there weren’t enough queries to build a useful language model. Furthermore, since it has few online data sources, native speakers have learned to use a mix of Zulu and English when searching for information on the web. So for our Zulu Voice Search product, we had to build a truly hybrid recognizer, allowing free mixture of both languages. Our phonetic inventory covers both English and Zulu and our grammars allow natural switching from Zulu to English, emulating speaker behavior.
This is our first release of Voice Search in a native African language, and we hope that it won’t be the last. We’ll continue to work on technology for languages that have until now received little attention from the speech recognition community.
Salani kahle!**
* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu
Welkom*!
Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages.
We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often received little attention from the speech research community. Their phonetics, grammar, acoustics, etc., haven’t been extensively studied, making the development of ASR (automatic speech recognition) voice search systems challenging.
We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.
We also think it’s important that researchers in these countries take a leading role in advancing the state of the art in their own languages. To this end, we’ve collaborated with the Multilingual Speech Technology group at South Africa’s North-West University led by Prof. Ettiene Barnard (also of the Meraka Research Institute), an authority in speech technology for South African languages. Our development effort was spearheaded by Charl van Heerden, a South African intern and a student of Prof. Barnard. With the help of Prof. Barnard’s team, we collected acoustic data in the three languages, developed lexicons and grammars, and Charl and others used those to develop the three Voice Search systems. A team of language specialists traveled to several cities collecting audio samples from hundreds of speakers in multiple acoustic conditions such as street noise, background speech, etc. Speakers were asked to read typical search queries into an Android app specifically designed for audio data collection.
For Zulu, we faced the additional challenge of few text sources on the web. We often analyze the search queries from local versions of Google to build our lexicons and language models. However, for Zulu there weren’t enough queries to build a useful language model. Furthermore, since it has few online data sources, native speakers have learned to use a mix of Zulu and English when searching for information on the web. So for our Zulu Voice Search product, we had to build a truly hybrid recognizer, allowing free mixture of both languages. Our phonetic inventory covers both English and Zulu and our grammars allow natural switching from Zulu to English, emulating speaker behavior.
This is our first release of Voice Search in a native African language, and we hope that it won’t be the last. We’ll continue to work on technology for languages that have until now received little attention from the speech recognition community.
Salani kahle!**
* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu
App Tuesday: Eight new apps for your business
The Google Apps Marketplace helps your business discover and deploy the right web-apps that integrate with Google Apps, reduce IT costs, and eliminate redundant log-ins and data entry. Every App Tuesday, we welcome even more apps that expand the range of solutions available to businesses.
Today, eight more apps join the Apps Marketplace, all with single sign-on convenience and hassle-free access through the universal navigation bar. Most apps have even deeper integrations—read below to learn more.
Embed this presentation on your own site to spread the word about our newest apps
Read more about the apps launching this App Tuesday on the Google Enterprise blog, or go shop the Google Apps Marketplace to find the perfect solutions to help you move further into the cloud.
Today, eight more apps join the Apps Marketplace, all with single sign-on convenience and hassle-free access through the universal navigation bar. Most apps have even deeper integrations—read below to learn more.
Embed this presentation on your own site to spread the word about our newest apps
Read more about the apps launching this App Tuesday on the Google Enterprise blog, or go shop the Google Apps Marketplace to find the perfect solutions to help you move further into the cloud.
Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews
With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn’t stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Over time we’ve made steady improvements to our search results and snippets to help you pick a great page. Now we’re making a leap to image-based snapshots—a new kind of visual search result we call “Instant Previews” which makes it even faster to choose the right result.
Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. Here’s a video showing Instant Previews in action:
In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit. Here are some of the things you can do to get the most out of Instant Previews:
We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load. With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under one-tenth of a second. Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.
Well, I think that’s enough of a preview—soon you can try out the real thing for yourself! The new feature is rolling out now and should be available in more than 40 languages in the next few days.
Update 6:50AM: We removed the YouTube video to update it. We'll be back shortly.
Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. Here’s a video showing Instant Previews in action:
In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. The previews provide new ways to evaluate search results, making you more likely to find what you’re looking for on the pages you visit. Here are some of the things you can do to get the most out of Instant Previews:
- Quickly compare results - A visual comparison of search results helps you pick the one that’s right for you. Quickly flip through previews to see which page looks best.
- Pinpoint relevant content - Text call outs, in orange, will sometimes highlight where your search terms appear on the webpage so you can evaluate if it’s what you're looking for.
- Interact with the results page - Page previews let you see the layout of a webpage before clicking the search result. Looking for a chart, picture, map or list? See if you can spot one in the preview.
We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load. With Instant Previews, we match your query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under one-tenth of a second. Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.
Well, I think that’s enough of a preview—soon you can try out the real thing for yourself! The new feature is rolling out now and should be available in more than 40 languages in the next few days.
Update 6:50AM: We removed the YouTube video to update it. We'll be back shortly.
Update 4:35PM: Added updated YouTube video. Thanks for your patience!
Monday, November 8, 2010
Happy holidays from Google Chrome: free holiday Wi-Fi at 30,000 feet
Not too long ago, flying home for the holidays meant disconnecting for several hours until you touched down at your destination. Today, Wi-Fi technologies allow us to stay connected even at 30,000 feet above the ground, so we can read the news, browse the web (to beat the long-haul boredom) and send that last-minute planning email before the family reunion. This holiday season, there will be more connected flyers than ever before.
On the Chrome team, we’re big fans of innovations that make our lives on the web and in the browser better—and it all starts with more ubiquitous access to the Internet. So for this holiday season, we’ve teamed up with AirTran, Delta and Virgin America to offer free Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi on every domestic flight from November 20, 2010 through January 2, 2011.
We were excited by the response from last year’s free holiday Wi-Fi program, and thought that this would be a perfect holiday gift to help you stay connected to your loved ones as you head home. You can find out more about this partnership at www.freeholidaywifi.com. If you haven’t tried Chrome yet, remember to download the browser before you take to the skies, or try it when you’re back on the ground.
On the Chrome team, we’re big fans of innovations that make our lives on the web and in the browser better—and it all starts with more ubiquitous access to the Internet. So for this holiday season, we’ve teamed up with AirTran, Delta and Virgin America to offer free Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi on every domestic flight from November 20, 2010 through January 2, 2011.
We were excited by the response from last year’s free holiday Wi-Fi program, and thought that this would be a perfect holiday gift to help you stay connected to your loved ones as you head home. You can find out more about this partnership at www.freeholidaywifi.com. If you haven’t tried Chrome yet, remember to download the browser before you take to the skies, or try it when you’re back on the ground.
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